Al-Sultan Midhat

This monument, dedicated to the ritual practice of ablutions, has an almost rectangular footprint, extended on the side by a projecting building housing the latrines. It sits in the centre of the city, near the Zaytuna mosque, allowing the faithful to accomplish their religious duties under the best conditions.

Pierced in the façade of the monument, the main door gives access to an angled vestibule opening at the back onto a small courtyard leading to the latrines, and on the right to the area reserved for ablutions. This is an open-air space surrounded by three porticos, each delimited by a single pointed horseshoe arch resting on columns topped by Hafsid and Hispano-Moorish capitals. These small galleries shelter narrow basins and banquettes. The centre of the courtyard is occupied by a small octagonal aedicule whose sides are adorned with marble carved with various arcature motifs. A fountain spout supplying water to a single basin is fitted in each of the eight sides.

White marble covers the major part of the lower walls. The upper parts of the building display a richness and elegance that concord with the laudatory reports made by the Hafsid and post-Hafsid historians. Since the last restoration, kaddal (limestone) replaced marble in a few places on the facing, but originally all the surfaces were clad in white marble inlaid with black marble. In addition to being used for the arch stones, black marble was chosen to contour the arches, adorn their rectangular framing or frame the interior sides of the abutments. It is also present in the composition  of the marvellous panels that occupy the tympana and corner pieces of the arches, displaying star figures and motifs resembling zvastika. However, of all the porticos, the corridor portico is by far the most richly decorated. The simple border that usually contours the rectangular frame of the arches is here replaced by a double interlaced ribbon, while the star figure contained in a circle is replaced, in the corner pieces, by a flower resembling a lily. The use of marble to the exclusion of all other materials probably establishes a parallel between this building and the Antique Ifriqiyan tradition. However, there are no known buildings earlier to this one where marble marquetry and two-toned arch stones are used in such abundance. It is therefore plausible that the use of this technique came to Ifriqiya by means of Mamluk Egypt, from the Hafsid period and more precisely the fifteenth century.

The midhat, by its innovative decoration, was not only a model for the genre but must have served as an example, from the mid-fifteenth century, for many other buildings that have now disappeared or are not known to us. It no doubt influenced a part of the ornamentation of the Sidi Qasim Jelizi zawiya (Tunis, fifteenth century).

All the motifs reported in this monument find equivalents in the Mamluk buildings of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries. The black ribbon surrounding the circular or square areas, the double interlaced border, the star figures, the marble panels decorated with adjacent disks, and the motif evoking a fleur-de-lis are common motifs in the marble decorations of funereal mosques such as those of Barsbay sultans Al-Mu'ayyid (Cairo, Egypt, 1436) or Qaytbay (Cairo, Egypt, 1472-1474). This process spread in Ottoman Turkey from the fourteenth century[1]. The success it had in Tunisia from the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries[2] is known.

[2] Dar Ûthman, Tunis, 1595